]]>(Pictured: Friedrich von Schiller) I am happy to present the second post of Chapter III of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing critique of romanticism as a literary school ever penned. Babbitt (1865-1933) was a cultural and literary critic, serving as Professor of French Literature at Harvard. He and his friend Paul Elmer More (of Princeton) became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism. Babbitt was a pioneer in the study of comparative literature; his writing, as you will see, is notable for its clarity and perspicacity.

CHAPTER III

ROMANTIC IMAGINATION (Part 2)

It is clear from what has already been said that Rousseau’s imagination was in a general way Arcadian, and this, if not the highest, is perhaps the most prevalent type of imagination. In surveying the literature of the world one is struck not only by the universality of the pastoral or idyllic element, but by the number of forms it has assumed—forms ranging from the extreme of artificiality and conventionalism to the purest poetry. The very society against the artificiality of which Rousseau’s whole work is a protest is itself in no small degree a pastoral creation. Various elements indeed entered into the life of the drawing-room as it came to be conceived towards the beginning of the seventeenth century. The Marquise de Rambouillet and others who set out at this time to live in the grand manner were in so far governed either by genuine or by artificial decorum. But at the same time that the creators of le grand monde were aiming to be more “decent” than the men and women of the sixteenth century, they were patterning themselves upon the shepherds and shepherdesses of D’Urfé’s interminable pastoral “l’Astrée.” They were seeking to create a sort of enchanted world from which the harsh cares of ordinary life were banished and where they might be free, like true Arcadians, to discourse of love. This discourse of love was associated with what I have defined as intellectual romanticism. In spite of the attacks by the exponents of humanistic good sense (Molière, Boileau, etc.) on this drawing-room affectation, it lingered on and still led in the eighteenth century, as Rousseau complained, to “inconceivable refinements.” (1) At the same time we should recollect that there is a secret bond between all forms of Arcadian dreaming. Not only was Rousseau fascinated, like the early précieux and précieuses, by D’Urfé’s pastoral, but he himself appealed by his renewal of the main pastoral theme of love to the descendants of these former Arcadians in the polite society of his time. The love of Rousseau is associated not like that of the précieux with the intellect, but with the emotions, and so he substitutes for a “wire-drawn and super-subtilized gallantry,” the ground-swell of elemental passion. (2) Moreover, the definitely primitivistic coloring that he gave to his imaginative renewal of the pastoral dream appealed to an age that was reaching the last stages of over-refinement. Primitivism is, strictly speaking, nothing new in the world. It always tends to appear in periods of complex civilization. The charms of the simple life and of a return to nature were celebrated especially during the Alexandrian period of Greek literature for the special delectation no doubt of the most sophisticated members of this very sophisticated society. “Nothing,” as Dr. Santayana says, “is farther from the common people than the corrupt desire to be primitive.” Primitivistic dreaming was also popular in ancient Rome at its most artificial moment. The great ancients, however, though enjoying the poetry of the primitivistic dream, were not the dupes of this dream. Horace, for example, lived at the most artificial moment of Rome when primitivistic dreaming was popular as it had been at Alexandria. He descants on the joys of the simple life in a well-known ode. One should not therefore hail him, like Schiller, as the founder of the sentimental school “of which he has remained the unsurpassed model.” (3) For the person who plans to return to nature in Horace’s poem is the old usurer Alfius, who changes his mind at the last moment and puts out his mortgages again. In short, the final attitude of the urbane Horace towards the primitivistic dream—it could hardly be otherwise—is ironical.

Rousseau seems destined to remain the supreme example, at least in the Occident, of the man who takes the primitivistic dream seriously, who attempts to set up primitivism as a philosophy and even as a religion. Rousseau’s account of his sudden illumination on the road from Paris to Vincennes is famous: the scales, he tells us, fell from his eyes even as they had from the eyes of Paul on the road to Damascus, and he saw how man had fallen from the felicity of his primitive estate; how the blissful ignorance in which he had lived at one with himself and harmless to his fellows had been broken by the rise of intellectual self-consciousness and the resulting progress in the sciences and arts. Modern students of Rousseau have, under the influence of James, taken this experience on the road to Vincennes to be an authentic case of conversion, (4) but this is merely one instance of our modern tendency to confound the subrational with the superrational. What one finds in this alleged conversion, when one looks into it, is a sort of “subliminal uprush” of the Arcadian memories of his youth, especially of his life at Annecy and Les Charmettes, and at the same time the contrast between these Arcadian memories and the hateful constraints he had suffered at Paris in his attempts to adjust himself to an uncongenial environment.

We can trace even more clearly perhaps the process by which the Arcadian dreamer comes to set up as a seer, in Rousseau’s relation of the circumstances under which he came to compose his “Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.” He goes off on a sort of picnic with Thérèse into the forest of St. Germain and gives himself up to imagining the state of primitive man. “Plunged in the forest,” he says, “I sought and found there the image of primitive times of which I proudly drew the history; I swooped down on the little falsehoods of men; I ventured to lay bare their nature, to follow the progress of time and of circumstances which have disfigured it, and comparing artificial man (l’homme de l’homme) with natural man, to show in his alleged improvement the true source of his miseries. My soul, exalted by these sublime contemplations, rose into the presence of the Divinity. Seeing from this vantage point that the blind pathway of prejudices followed by my fellows was also that of their errors, misfortunes and crimes, I cried out to them in a feeble voice that they could not hear: Madmen, who are always complaining of nature, know that all your evils come from yourselves alone.”

The golden age for which the human heart has an ineradicable longing is here presented not as poetical, which it certainly is, but as a “state of nature” from which man has actually fallen. The more or less innocent Arcadian dreamer is being transformed into the dangerous Utopist. He puts the blame of the conflict and division of which he is conscious in himself upon the social conventions that set bounds to his temperament and impulses; once get rid of these purely artificial restrictions and he feels that he will again be at one with himself and “nature.” With such a vision of nature as this it is not surprising that every constraint is unendurable to Rousseau, that he likes, as Berlioz was to say of himself later, to “make all barriers crack.” He is ready to shatter all the forms of civilized life in favor of something that never existed, of a state of nature that is only the projection of his own temperament and its dominant desires upon the void. His programme amounts in practice to the indulgence of infinite indeterminate desire, to an endless and aimless vagabondage of the emotions with the imagination as their free accomplice.

This longing of the highly sophisticated person to get back to the primitive and naïve and unconscious, or what amounts to the same thing, to shake off the trammels of tradition and reason in favor of free and passionate self-expression, underlies, as I have pointed out, the conception of original genius which itself underlies the whole modern movement. A book reflecting the primitivistic trend of the eighteenth century, and at the same time pointing the way, as we shall see presently, to the working out of the fundamental primitivistic contrast between the natural and the artificial in the romanticism of the early nineteenth century, is Schiller’s “Essay on Simple and Sentimental Poetry.” The poetry that does not “look before or after,” that is free from self-questioning and self-consciousness, and has a child-like spontaneity, Schiller calls simple or naïve. The poet, on the other hand, who is conscious of his fall from nature and who, from the midst of his sophistication, longs to be back once more at his mother’s bosom, is sentimental. Homer and his heroes, for example, are naïve; Werther, who yearns in a drawing-room for the Homeric simplicity, is sentimental. The longing of the modern man for nature, says Schiller, is that of the sick man for health. It is hard to see in Schiller’s “nature” anything more than a development of Rousseau’s primitivistic Arcadia. To be sure, Schiller warns us that, in order to recover the childlike and primitive virtues still visible in the man of genius, we must not renounce culture. We must not seek to revert lazily to an Arcadia, but must struggle forward to an Elysium. Unfortunately Schiller’s Elysium has a strange likeness to Rousseau’s Arcadia; and that is because Schiller’s own conception of life is, in the last analysis, overwhelmingly sentimental. His most Elysian conception, that of a purely aesthetic Greece, a wonderland of unalloyed beauty, is also a bit of Arcadian sentimentalizing. Inasmuch as Rousseau’s state of nature never existed outside of dreamland, the Greek who is simple or naïve in this sense is likewise a myth. He has no real counterpart either in the Homeric age or any other age of Greece. It is hard to say which is more absurd, to make the Greeks naïve, or to turn Horace into a sentimentalist. One should note how this romantic perversion of the Greeks for which Schiller is largely responsible is related to his general view of the imagination. We have seen that in the “Aesthetic Letters’’ he maintains that if the imagination is to conceive the ideal it must be free; and that to be free it must be emancipated from purpose and engage in a sort of play. If the imagination has to subordinate itself to a real object it ceases in so far to be free. Hence the more ideal the imagination the farther it gets away from a real object. By his theory of the imagination, Schiller thus encourages that opposition between the ideal and the real which figures so largely in romantic psychology. A man may consent to adjust a mere dream to the requirements of the real, but when his dream is promoted to the dignity of an ideal it is plain that he will be less ready to make the sacrifice. Schiller’s Greece is very ideal in the sense I have just defined. It hovers before the imagination as a sort of Golden Age of pure beauty, a land of chimeras that is alone worthy of the aesthete’s habitation. As an extreme type of the romantic Hellenist, one may take Hölderlin, who was a disciple at once of Schiller and of Rousseau. He begins by urging emancipation from every form of outer and traditional control in the name of spontaneity. “Boldly forget,” he cries in the very accents of Rousseau, “what you have inherited and won—all laws and customs—and like new-born babes lift up your eyes to godlike nature.”

(1) Nouvelle Héloïse, Pt. ii, Lettre xvii.
(2) Rostand has hit off this change in the Balcony Scene of his Cyrano de Bergerac.
(3) Essay on Simple and Sentimental Poetry.
(4) The Life of Rousseau, by Gerhard Gran, is written from this point of view.

]]>https://www.traditionrestored.com/2018/02/11/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-iii-part-2/feed/0483Rousseau and Romanticism, Chapter III (Part 1)https://www.traditionrestored.com/2018/01/26/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-iii-part-1/
https://www.traditionrestored.com/2018/01/26/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-iii-part-1/#respondFri, 26 Jan 2018 20:00:28 +0000https://www.traditionrestored.com/?p=472(Pictured: Jean de la Fontaine) I am happy to present the first post of Chapter III of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced...

]]>(Pictured: Jean de la Fontaine) I am happy to present the first post of Chapter III of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing critique of romanticism as a literary school ever penned. Babbitt (1865-1933) was a cultural and literary critic, serving as Professor of French Literature at Harvard. He and his friend Paul Elmer More (of Princeton) became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism. Babbitt was a pioneer in the study of comparative literature; his writing, as you will see, is notable for its clarity and perspicacity.

CHAPTER III

ROMANTIC IMAGINATION (Part 1)

I HAVE already spoken of the contrast established by the theorists of original genius in the eighteenth century between the different types of imagination—especially between the literary and the scientific imagination. According to these theorists, it will be remembered, the scientific imagination should be strictly subordinated to judgment, whereas the literary imagination, freed from the shackles of imitation, should be at liberty to wander wild in its own empire of chimeras, or, at all events, should be far less sharply checked by judgment. It is easy to follow the extension of these English views of genius and imagination into the France of Rousseau and Diderot, and then the elaboration of these same views, under the combined influence of both France and England, in Germany. I have tried to show that Kant, especially in his “Critique of Judgment,” and Schiller in his “Aesthetic Letters” (1795) prepare the way for the conception of the creative imagination that is at the very heart of the romantic movement. According to this romantic conception, as we have seen, the imagination is to be free, not merely from outer formalistic constraint, but from all constraint whatever. This extreme romantic emancipation of the imagination was accompanied by an equally extreme emancipation of the emotions. Both kinds of emancipations are, as I have tried to show, a recoil partly from neo-classical judgment—a type of judgment which seemed to oppress all that is creative and spontaneous in man under a weight of outer convention; partly, from the reason of the Enlightenment, a type of reason that was so logical and abstract that it seemed to mechanize the human spirit, and to be a denial of all that is immediate and intuitive. The neo-classical judgment, with its undue unfriendliness to the imagination, is itself a recoil, let us remember, from the imaginative extravagance of the “metaphysicals,” the intellectual romanticists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also, if we take a sufficiently wide view, from the Quixotic type of romanticism, the romanticism of action, that we associate with the Middle Ages.

Now not only are men governed by their imaginations (the imagination, as Pascal says, disposes of everything), but the type of imagination by which most men are governed may be defined in the widest sense of the word as romantic. Nearly every man cherishes his dream, his conceit of himself as he would like to be, a sort of “ideal” projection of his own desires, in comparison with which his actual life seems a hard and cramping routine. “Man must conceive himself what he is not,” as Dr. Johnson says, “for who is pleased with what he is?” The ample habitation that a man rears for his fictitious or “ideal” self often has some slight foundation in fact, but the higher he rears it the more insecure it becomes, until finally , like Perrette in the fable, he brings the whole structure down about his ears by the very gesture of his dream. “We all of us,” La Fontaine concludes in perhaps the most delightful account of the romantic imagination in literature, “wise as well as foolish, indulge in day-dreams. There is nothing sweeter. A flattering illusion carries away our spirits. All the wealth in the world is ours all honors and all women,” (1) etc. When Johnson descants on the “dangerous prevalence of imagination,” (2) and warns us to stick to “sober probability” what he means is the dangerous prevalence of day-dreaming. The retreat of the Rousseauist into some “land of chimeras” or tower of ivory assumes forms almost incredibly complex and subtle, but at bottom the ivory tower is only one form of man’s ineradicable longing to escape from the oppression of the actual into some land of heart’s desire, some golden age of fancy. As a matter of fact, Rousseau’s imaginative activity often approaches very closely to the delights of day-dreaming as described by La Fontaine. He was never more imaginative, he tells us, than when on a walking-trip—especially when the trip had no definite goal, or at least when he could take his time in reaching it. The Wanderlust of body and spirit could then be satisfied together. Actual vagabondage seemed to be an aid to the imagination in its escape from verisimilitude. One should note especially Rousseau’s account of his early wandering from Lyons to Paris and the airy structures that he raised on his anticipations of what he might find there. Inasmuch as he was to be attached at Paris to the Swiss Colonel Godard, he already traced for himself in fancy, in spite of his short-sightedness, a career of military glory. “I had read that Marshal Schomberg was short-sighted, why shouldn’t Marshal Rousseau be so too?” In the meanwhile, touched by the sight of the groves and brooks, “I felt in the midst of my glory that my heart was not made for so much turmoil, and soon without knowing how, I found myself once more among my beloved pastorals, renouncing forever the toils of Mars.”

Thus alongside the real world and in more or less sharp opposition to it, Rousseau builds up a fictitious world, that pays des chimères which is alone, as he tells us, worthy of habitation. To study his imaginative activity is simply to study the new forms that he gives to what I have called man’s ineradicable longing for some Arcadia, some land of heart’s desire. Goethe compares the illusions that man nourishes in his breast to the population of statues in ancient Rome which were almost as numerous as the population of living men. The important thing from the point of view of sanity is that a man should not blur the boundaries between the two populations, that he should not cease to discriminate between his fact and his fiction. If he confuses what he dreams himself to be with what he actually is, he has already entered upon the pathway of madness. It was, for example, natural for a youth like Rousseau who was at once romantic and musical, to dream that he was a great composer; but actually to set up as a great composer and to give the concert at Lausanne, shows an unwillingness to criminate between his fictitious and his real world that is plainly pathological. If not already a megalomaniac, he was even then on the way to megalomania.

To wander through the world as though it were an Arcadia or enchanted vision contrived for one’s especial benefit is an attitude of childhood—especially of imaginative childhood. “Wherever children are,” says Novalis, “there is the golden age.” As the child grows and matures there is a more or less painful process of adjustment between his “vision” and the particular reality in which he is placed. A little sense gets knocked into his head, and often, it must be confessed, a good deal of the imagination gets knocked out. As Wordsworth complains, the vision fades into the light of common day. The striking fact about Rousseau is that, far more than Wordsworth, he held fast to his vision. He refused to adjust it to an unpalatable reality. During the very years when the ordinary youth is forced to subordinate his luxurious imaginings to some definite discipline he fell under the influence of Madame de Warens who encouraged rather than thwarted his Arcadian bent. Later, when almost incurably confirmed in his penchant for revery, he came into contact with the refined society of Paris, an environment requiring so difficult an adjustment that no one we are told could accomplish the feat unless he had been disciplined into the appropriate habits from the age of six. He is indeed the supreme example of the unadjusted man, of the original genius whose imagination has never suffered either inner or outer constraint, who is more of an Arcadian dreamer at sixty perhaps than he was at sixteen. He writes to the Bailli de Mirabeau (31 January, 1761):

“The fatigue of thinking becomes every day more painful to me. I love to dream, but freely, allowing my mind to wander without enslaving myself to any subject. . . . This idle and contemplative life which you do not approve and which I do not excuse, becomes to me daily more delicious; to wander alone endlessly and ceaselessly among the trees and rocks about my dwelling, to muse or rather to be as irresponsible as I please, and as you say, to go wool-gathering; . . . finally to give myself up unconstrainedly to my fantasies which, thank heaven, are all within my power: that, sir, is for me the supreme enjoyment, than which I can imagine nothing superior in this world for a man at my age and in my condition.”

Rousseau, then, owes his significance not only to the fact that he was supremely imaginative in an age that was disposed to deny the supremacy of the imagination, but to the fact that he was imaginative in a particular way. A great multitude since his time must be reckoned among his followers, not because they have had certain ideas but because they have exhibited a similar quality of imagination. In seeking to define this quality of imagination we are therefore at the very heart of our subject.

]]>https://www.traditionrestored.com/2018/01/26/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-iii-part-1/feed/0472Rousseau and Romanticism, Chapter II (Part 5)https://www.traditionrestored.com/2018/01/12/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-ii-part-5/
https://www.traditionrestored.com/2018/01/12/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-ii-part-5/#respondFri, 12 Jan 2018 19:58:42 +0000https://www.traditionrestored.com/?p=459I am happy to present the fifth and final post of Chapter II of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the...

]]>I am happy to present the fifth and final post of Chapter II of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing critique of romanticism as a literary school ever penned. Babbitt (1865-1933) was a cultural and literary critic, serving as Professor of French Literature at Harvard. He and his friend Paul Elmer More (of Princeton) became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism. Babbitt was a pioneer in the study of comparative literature; his writing, as you will see, is notable for its clarity and perspicacity.

CHAPTER II

ROMANTIC GENIUS (Part 5)

There is an unbroken development from the early exponents of original genius down to cubists, futurists and post-impressionists and the corresponding schools in literature. The partisans of expression as opposed to form in the eighteenth century led to the fanatics of expression in the nineteenth and these have led to the maniacs of expression of the twentieth. The extremists in painting have got so far beyond Cézanne, who was regarded not long ago as one of the wildest of innovators, that Cézanne is, we are told, “in a fair way to achieve the unhappy fate of becoming a classic.” Poe was fond of quoting a saying of Bacon’s that “there is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” This saying became known in France through Baudelaire’s rendering of Poe and was often ascribed to Poe himself. It was taken to mean that the stranger one became the nearer one was getting to perfect beauty. And if we grant this view of beauty we must admit that some of the decadents succeeded in becoming very beautiful indeed. But the more the element of proportion in beauty is sacrificed to strangeness the more the result will seem to the normal man to be, not beauty at all, but rather an esoteric cult of ugliness. The romantic genius therefore denounces the normal man as a Philistine and at the same time, since he cannot please him, seeks at least to shock him and so capture his attention by the very violence of eccentricity.

The saying I have quoted from Bacon is perhaps an early example of the inner alliance between things that superficially often seem remote—the scientific spirit and the spirit of romance. Scientific discovery has given a tremendous stimulus to wonder and curiosity, has encouraged a purely exploratory attitude towards life and raised an overwhelming prepossession in favor of the new as compared with the old. Baconian and Rousseauist evidently come together by their primary emphasis on novelty. The movement towards a more and more eccentric conception of art and literature has been closely allied in practice with the doctrine of progress—and that from the very dawn of the so-called Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns. It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the havoc that has been wrought by the transfer of the belief that the latest thing is the best—a belief that is approximately true of automobiles—from the material order to an entirely different realm. (1) The very heart of the classical message, one cannot repeat too often, is that one should aim first of all not to be original, but to be human, and that to be human one needs to look up to a sound model and imitate it. The imposition of form and proportion upon one’s expansive impulses which results from this process of imitation is, in the true sense of that much abused word, culture. Genuine culture is difficult and disciplinary. The mediation that it involves between the conflicting claims of form and expression requires the utmost contention of spirit. We have here a clue to the boundless success of the Rousseauistic doctrine of spontaneity, of the assertion that genius resides in the region of the primitive and unconscious and is hindered rather than helped by culture. It is easier to be a genius on Rousseauistic lines than to be a man on the terms imposed by the classicist. There is a fatal facility about creation when its quality is not tested by some standard set above the creator’s temperament; and the same fatal facility appears in criticism when the critic does not test creation by some standard set above both his own temperament and that of the creator. The romantic critic as a matter of fact confines his ambition to receiving so keen an impression from genius, conceived as something purely temperamental, that when this creative expression is passed through his temperament it will issue forth as a fresh expression. Taste, he holds, will thus tend to become one with genius, and criticism, instead of being cold and negative like that of the neo-classicist, will itself grow creative. But the critic who does not get beyond this stage will have gusto, zest, relish, what you will, he will not have taste. For taste involves a difficult mediation between the element of uniqueness in both critic and creator and that which is representative and human. Once eliminate this human standard that is set above the temperament of the creator and make of the critic in turn a mere pander to “genius” and it is hard to see what measure of a man’s excellence is left save his intoxication with himself; and this measure would scarcely seem to be trustworthy. “Every ass that’s romantic,” says Wolseley in his Preface to “Valentinian” (1686) “believes he’s inspired.”

An important aspect of the romantic theory of genius remains to be considered. This theory is closely associated in its rise and growth with the theory of the master faculty or ruling passion. A man can do that for which he has a genius without effort, whereas no amount of effort can avail to give a man that for which he has no native aptitude. (2) Buffon affirmed in opposition to this view that genius is only a capacity for taking pains or, as an American recently put it, is ten per cent inspiration and ninety per cent perspiration. This notion of genius not only risks running counter to the observed facts as to the importance of the native gift but it does not bring out as clearly as it might the real point at issue. Even though genius were shown to be ninety per cent inspiration a man should still, the classicist would insist, fix his attention on the fraction that is within his power. Thus Boileau says in substance at the outset of his “Art of Poetry” that a poet needs to be born under a propitious star. Genius is indispensable, and not merely genius in general but genius for the special kind of poetry in which he is to excel. Yet granting all this, he says to the poetical aspirant, bestir yourself! The mystery of grace will always be recognized in any view of life that gets at all beneath the surface. Yet it is still the better part to turn to the feasibility of works. The view of genius as merely a temperamental overflow is as a matter of fact only a caricature of the doctrine of grace. It suits the spiritual indolence of the creator who seeks to evade the more difficult half of his problem—which is not merely to create but to humanize his creation. Hawthorne, for example, is according to Mr. Brownell, too prone (except in the “Scarlet Letter”) to get away from the clear sunlight of normal human experience into a region of somewhat crepuscular symbolism, and this is because he yielded too complacently and fatalistically to what he conceived to be his genius. The theory of genius is perhaps the chief inheritance of the New England transcendentalists from romanticism. Hawthorne was more on his guard against the extreme implications of the theory than most other members of this group. It remains to be seen how much the exaltation of genius and depreciation of culture that marks one whole side of Emerson will in the long run tell against his reputation. The lesser New England men showed a rare incapacity to distinguish between originality and mere freakishness either in themselves or in others.

It is fair to say that in lieu of the discipline of culture the romantic genius has often insisted on the discipline of technique; and this has been especially true in a country like France with its persistent tradition of careful workmanship. Gautier, for example, would have one’s “floating dream sealed” (3) in the hardest and most resisting material, that can only be mastered by the perfect craftsman; and he himself, falling into a confusion of the arts, tries to display such a craftsmanship by painting and carving with words. Flaubert, again, refines upon the technique of writing to a point where it becomes not merely a discipline but a torture. But if a man is to be a romantic genius in the fullest sense he must, it should seem, repudiate even the discipline of technique as well as the discipline of culture in favor of an artless spontaneity. For after all the genius is only the man who retains the virtues of the child, and technical proficiency is scarcely to be numbered among these virtues. The German romanticists already prefer the early Italian painters because of their naiveté and divine awkwardness to the later artists who had a more conscious mastery of their material. The whole Pre-Raphaelite movement is therefore only one aspect of Rousseau’s return to nature. To later primitivists the early Italians themselves seem far too deliberate. They would recover the spontaneity displayed in the markings on Alaskan totem poles or in the scratchings of the caveman on the flint. A prerequisite to pure genius, if we are to judge by their own productions, is an inability to draw. The futurists in their endeavor to convey symbolically their own “soul” or “ vision”—a vision be it noted of pure flux and motion—deny the very conditions of time and space that determine the special technique of painting; and inasmuch as to express one’s “soul” means for these moderns, as it did for the “genius” of the eighteenth century, to express the ineffable difference between themselves and others, the symbolizing of this soul to which they have sacrificed both culture and technique remains a dark mystery.

An eccentricity so extreme as to be almost or quite indistinguishable from madness is then the final outcome of the revolt of the original genius from the regularity of the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century had, one must confess, become too much like the Happy Valley from which Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, sought an egress. It was fair to the eye and satisfied all man’s ordinary needs, but it seemed at the same time to hem him in oppressively, and limit unduly his horizons. For the modern man, as for the prince in Johnson’s tale, a regular round of assured felicities has counted for nought as compared with the passion for the open; though now that he has tasted strange adventures, the modern man will scarcely decide at the end, like the prince, to “return to Abyssinia.” I have already spoken of the rationalistic and pseudo-classic elements in the eighteenth century that the romantic rebels found so intolerable. It is impossible to follow “reason,” they said in substance, and also to shake one’s thirst for the “infinite”; it is impossible to conform and imitate and at the same time to be free and original and spontaneous. Above all it is impossible to submit to the yoke of either reason or imitation and at the same time to be imaginative. This last assertion will always be the main point at issue in any genuine debate between classicist and romanticist. The supreme thing in life, the romanticist declares, is the creative imagination, and it can be restored to its rights only by repudiating imitation. The imagination is supreme the classicist grants but adds that to imitate rightly is to make the highest use of the imagination. To understand all that is implied in this central divergence between classicist and romanticist we shall need to study in more detail the kind of imaginative activity that has been encouraged in the whole movement extending from the rise of the original genius in the eighteenth century to the present day.

(1) See essay by Kenyon Cox on The Illusion of Progress, in his Artist and Public.

(2) One should note here as elsewhere points of contact between scientific and emotional naturalism. Take, for example, the educational theory that has led to the setting up of the elective system. The general human discipline embodied in the fixed curriculum is to be discarded in order that the individual may be free to work along the lines of his bent or “genius.” In a somewhat similar way scientific naturalism encourages the individual to sacrifice the general human discipline to a specialty.

]]>https://www.traditionrestored.com/2018/01/12/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-ii-part-5/feed/0459Rousseau and Romanticism, Chapter II (Part 4)https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/12/29/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-ii-part-4/
https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/12/29/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-ii-part-4/#respondFri, 29 Dec 2017 18:33:02 +0000https://www.traditionrestored.com/?p=438I am happy to present the fourth post of Chapter II of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing...

]]>I am happy to present the fourth post of Chapter II of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing critique of romanticism as a literary school ever penned. Babbitt (1865-1933) was a cultural and literary critic, serving as Professor of French Literature at Harvard. He and his friend Paul Elmer More (of Princeton) became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism. Babbitt was a pioneer in the study of comparative literature; his writing, as you will see, is notable for its clarity and perspicacity.

CHAPTER II

ROMANTIC GENIUS (Part 4)

The cult of the picturesque is closely associated with the cult of local color. Here as elsewhere romantic genius is, in contradistinction to classical genius which aims at the “grandeur of generality,” the genius of wonder and surprise. According to Buffon, who offers the rare spectacle of a man of science who is at the same time a theorist of the grand manner, genius is shown in the architectonic gift—in the power so to unify a subject as to keep its every detail in proper subordination to the whole. Any mere wantoning of the imagination in the pursuit of either the precious or the picturesque is to be severely repressed if one is to attain to the grandeur of generality. Buffon is truly classic in relating genius to design. Unfortunately he verges towards the pseudo-classic in his distrust of color, of the precise word and the vivid descriptive epithet. The growing verbal squeamishness that so strikes one towards the end of the neo-classic period is one outcome of artificial decorum, of confusing nobility of language with the language of the nobility. There was an increasing fear of the trivial word that might destroy the illusion of the grand manner, and also of the technical term that should be too suggestive of specialization. All terms were to be avoided that were not readily intelligible to a lady or gentleman in the drawing-room. And so it came to pass that by the end of the eighteenth century the grand manner, or elevated style, had come to be largely an art of ingenious circumlocution, and Buffon gives some countenance to this conception of classic dignity and representativeness when he declares that one should describe objects “only by the most general terms.” At all events the reply of the romantic genius to this doctrine is the demand for local color, for the concrete and picturesque phrase. The general truth at which the classicist aims the Rousseauist dismisses as identical with the gray and the academic, and bends all his efforts to the rendering of the vivid and unique detail. Of the readiness of the romantic genius to show (or one is tempted to say) to advertise his originality by trampling verbal decorum under foot along with every other kind of decorum, I shall have more to say later. He is ready to employ not only the homely and familiar word that the pseudo-classicist had eschewed as “low,” but words so local and technical as to be unintelligible to ordinary readers. Chateaubriand deals so specifically with the North American Indian and his environment that the result, according to Sainte-Beuve, is a sort of “tattooing” of his style. Hugo bestows a whole dictionary of architectural terms upon the reader in his “Notre Dame,” and of nautical terms in his “Toilers of the Sea.” In order to follow some of the passages in Balzac’s “César Birotteau,” one needs to be a lawyer or a professional accountant, and it has been said that in order to do justice to a certain description in Zola one would need to be a pork-butcher. In this movement towards a highly specialized vocabulary one should note a co-operation, as so often elsewhere, between the two wings of the naturalistic movement—the scientific and the emotional. The Rousseauist is, like the scientist, a specialist—he specializes in his own sensations. He goes in quest of emotional thrills for their own sake, just as Napoleon’s generals, according to Sainte-Beuve, waged war without any ulterior aim but for the sheer lust of conquest. The vivid images and picturesque details are therefore not sufficiently structural; each one tends to thrust itself forward without reference to the whole and to demand attention for its own sake.

The pursuit of the unrelated thrill without reference to its motivation or probability leads in the romantic movement to a sort of descent—often, it is true, a rapturous and lyrical descent—from the dramatic to the melodramatic. It is possible to trace this one-sided emphasis on wonder not merely in vocabulary but in the increasing resort to the principle of contrast. One suspects, for example, that Rousseau exaggerates the grotesqueness of his youthful failure as a musical composer at Lausanne in order that his success in the same rôle before the king and all the ladies of the court at Versailles may “stick more fiery off.” The contrast that Chateaubriand establishes between the two banks of the Mississippi at the beginning of his “Atala” is so complete as to put some strain on verisimilitude. One may note in this same description, as a somewhat different way of sacrificing the probable to the picturesque, the bears drunk on wild grapes and reeling on the branches of the elms. To prove that it was possible on some particular occasion to look down the vista of a forest glade on the lower Mississippi and see it closed by a drunken bear does not meet the difficulty at all. For art has to do, as was remarked long ago, not with the possible but the probable; and a bear in this posture is a possible but scarcely a probable bear.

To return to the principle of contrast: Hugo dilates upon his puniness as an infant (”abandoned by everybody, even by his mother”) in order to make his later achievement seem still more stupendous. (1) The use of the antithesis as the auxiliary of surprise, the abrupt and thrilling passage from light to shade or the contrary, finds perhaps its culminating expression in Hugo. A study of this one figure as it appears in his words and ideas, in his characters and situations and subjects, would show that he is the most melodramatic genius for whom high rank has ever been claimed in literature. The suddenness of Jean Valjean’s transformation from a convict into a saint may serve as a single instance of Hugo’s readiness to sacrifice verisimilitude to surprise in his treatment of character.

Closely allied to the desire to break up the monotonous surface of “good form” by the pointed and picturesque style in writing is the rise of the pointed and picturesque style in dress. A man may advertise his genius and originality (in the romantic sense of these terms) by departing from the accepted modes of costume as well as from the accepted modes of speech. Gautier’s scarlet waistcoat at the first performance of “Hernani” is of the same order as his flamboyant epithets, his riot of local color, and was at least as effective in achieving the main end of his life—to be, in his own phrase, the “terror of the sleek, baldheaded bourgeois.” In assuming the Armenian garb to the astonishment of the rustics of Motiers-Travers, Rousseau anticipates not merely Gautier but innumerable other violators of conventional correctness: here as elsewhere he deserves to rank as the classic instance, one is tempted to say, of romantic eccentricity. La Bruyère, an exponent of the traditional good-breeding against which Rousseauism is a protest, says that the gentleman allows himself to be dressed by his tailor. He wishes to be neither ahead of the mode nor behind it, being reluctant as he is in all things to oppose his private sense to the general sense. His point of view in the matter of dress is not so very remote from that of a genuine classicism, whereas the enthusiast who recently went about the streets of New York (until taken in by the police) garbed as a contemporary of Pericles is no less plainly a product of Rousseauistic revolt.

Chateaubriand’s relation to Rousseauism in this matter calls for special comment. He encouraged, and to some extent held, the belief that to show genius and originality one must be irregular and tempestuous in all things, even in the arrangement of one’s hair. At the same time he preached reason. His heart, in short, was romantic, his head classical. Both as a classicist and a romanticist he was ready to repudiate on the one hand his master Rousseau, and on the other his own disciples. As a romantic genius he wished to regard himself as unique and so unrelated to Rousseau. At the same time he also looked upon it as a sort of insolence for any of his own followers to aspire to such a lonely preeminence in grief as René. As a classicist he saw that great art aims at the normal and the representative, and that it is therefore absurd for people to pattern themselves on such morbid and exceptional characters as René and Childe Harold. Most of the romanticists indeed showed themselves very imitative even in their attempts at uniqueness, and the result was a second or third hand, or as one is tempted to say, a stale eccentricity. In their mere following of the mode many of the French romanticists of 1830 were ready to impose a painful discipline upon themselves (2) in order to appear abnormal, in order, for instance, to acquire a livid Byronic complexion. Some of those who wished to seem elegiac like Lamartine rather than to emulate the violent and histrionic revolt of the Conrads and Laras actually succeeded, we are told, in giving themselves consumption (hence the epithet école poitrinaire).

In outer and visible freakishness the French romanticists of 1830 probably bore away the palm, though in inner and spiritual remoteness from normal human experience they can scarcely vie with the early German romanticists. And this is doubtless due to the fact that in France there was a more definite outer standard from which to advertise their departure, and also to the fact that the revolt against this standard was so largely participated in by the painters and by writers like Gautier who were also interested in painting. Chateaubriand writes of the romantic painters (and the passage will also serve to illustrate his attitude towards his own disciples): “[These artists] rig themselves up as comic sketches, as grotesques, as caricatures. Some of them wear frightful mustaches, one would suppose that they are going forth to conquer the world—their brushes are halberds, their paint-scratchers sabres; others have enormous beards and hair that puffs out or hangs down their shoulders; they smoke a cigar volcanically. These cousins of the rainbow, to use a phrase of our old Régnier, have their heads filled with deluges, seas, rivers, forests, cataracts, tempests, or it may be with slaughters, tortures and scaffolds. One finds among them human skulls, foils, mandolins, helmets and dolmans. . . . They aim to form a separate species between the ape and the satyr; they give you to understand that the secrecy of the studio has its dangers and that there is no safety for the models.”

These purely personal eccentricities that so marked the early stages in the warfare between the Bohemian and the philistine have as a matter of fact diminished in our own time. Nowadays a man of the distinction of Disraeli or even of Bulwer-Lytton (3) would scarcely affect, as they did, the flamboyant style in dress. But the underlying failure to discriminate between the odd and the original has persisted and has worked out into even extremer consequences. One may note, as I have said, even in the early figures in the movement a tendency to play to the gallery, a something that suggests the approach of the era of the lime-light and the big headline. Rousseau himself has been called the father of yellow journalists.

(3) For Disraeli see Wilfrid Ward, Men and Matters, 54 ff. Of Bulwer-Lytton at Nice about 1860 Princess von Racowitza writes as follows in her Autobiography (p. 46): “His fame was at its zenith. He seemed to me antediluvian, with his long dyed curls and his old-fashioned dress . . . with long coats reaching to the ankles, knee-breeches, and long colored waistcoats. Also, he appeared always with a young lady who adored him, and who was followed by a man servant carrying a harp. She sat at his feet and appeared as he did in the costume of 1830, with long flowing curls called Anglaises. . . . In society, however, people ran after him tremendously, and spoilt him in every possible way. He read aloud from his own works, and, in especially poetic passages, his ‘Alice’ accompanied him with arpeggios on the harp.”

]]>https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/12/29/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-ii-part-4/feed/0438Rousseau and Romanticism, Chapter II (Part 3)https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/12/13/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-ii-part-3/
https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/12/13/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-ii-part-3/#respondWed, 13 Dec 2017 21:15:01 +0000https://www.traditionrestored.com/?p=426I am happy to present the third post of Chapter II of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing...

]]>I am happy to present the third post of Chapter II of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing critique of romanticism as a literary school ever penned. Babbitt (1865-1933) was a cultural and literary critic, serving as Professor of French Literature at Harvard. He and his friend Paul Elmer More (of Princeton) became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism. Babbitt was a pioneer in the study of comparative literature; his writing, as you will see, is notable for its clarity and perspicacity.

CHAPTER II

ROMANTIC GENIUS (Part 3)

It is especially important to determine a man’s attitude towards himself in this matter of awe and wonder, in other words to determine whether he is taken up first of all with that element in his own nature which makes him incomprehensibly like other men or with that element which makes him incomprehensibly different from them. A man, the wise have always insisted, should look with reverence but not with wonder on himself. Rousseau boasts, that if not better than other men, he is at least different. By this gloating sense of his own otherwiseness he may be said to have set the tone for a whole epoch. Chateaubriand, for instance, is quite overcome by his own uniqueness and wonderfulness. At the most ordinary happenings he exclaims, as Sainte-Beuve points out, that such things happen only to him. Hugo again is positively stupefied at the immensity of his own genius. The theatricality that one feels in so much of the art of this period arises from the eagerness of the genius to communicate to others something of the amazement that he feels at himself. René’s first concern is to inspire wonder even in the women who love him. “Céluta felt that she was going to fall upon the bosom of this man as one falls into an abyss.” [René, a novel written by Chateaubriand.]

In thus putting such an exclusive emphasis on wonder the Rousseauistic movement takes on a regressive character. For if life begins in wonder it culminates in awe. To put “the budding rose above the rose full-blown” may do very well for a mood, but as an habitual attitude it implies that one is more interested in origins than in ends; and this means in practice to look backward and downward instead of forward and up. The conscious analysis that is needed if one is to establish orderly sequences and relationships and so work out a kingdom of ends is repudiated by the Rousseauist because it diminishes wonder, because it interferes with the creative impulse of genius as it gushes up spontaneously from the depths of the unconscious. The whole movement is filled with the praise of ignorance and of those who still enjoy its inappreciable advantages—the savage, the peasant and above all the child. The Rousseauist may indeed be said to have discovered the poetry of childhood of which only traces can be found in the past, but at what would seem at times a rather heavy sacrifice of rationality. Rather than consent to have the bloom taken off things by analysis one should, as Coleridge tells us, sink back to the devout state of childlike wonder. However, to grow ethically is not to sink back but to struggle painfully forward. To affirm the contrary is to set up the things that are below the ordinary rational level as a substitute for the things that are above it, and at the same time to proclaim one’s inability to mature. The romanticist, it is true, is wont to oppose to the demand for maturity Christ’s praise of the child. But Christ evidently praises the child not because of his capacity for wonder but because of his freedom from sin, and it is of the essence of Rousseauism to deny the very existence of sin—at least in the Christian sense of the word. One may also read in the New Testament that when one has ceased to be a child one should give up childish things, and this is a saying that no primitivist, so far as I am aware, has ever quoted. On the contrary, he is ready to assert that what comes to the child spontaneously is superior to the deliberate moral effort of the mature man. The speeches of all the sages are, according to Maeterlinck, outweighed by the unconscious wisdom of the passing child. Wordsworth hails a child of six as “Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!” (It is only fair to Coleridge to say that he refused to follow Wordsworth into this final abyss of absurdity. [See Biographia literaria, ch. xxii.] In much the same way Hugo pushes his adoration of the child to the verge of what has been termed “solemn silliness” (niaiserie solonnelle).

To set up the spontaneity of the child as a substitute for insight, to identify wonder with awe, romance with religion, is to confuse the very planes of being. There would appear to be a confusion of this kind in what Carlyle takes to be his own chief discovery, in his “natural supernaturalism.” (1) The natural order we must grant Carlyle is unfathomable, but it is not therefore awful, only wonderful. A movement of charity belongs as Pascal says to an entirely different order. (2)

The spiritual order to which Pascal refers lifts a man so far as he perceives it out of his ordinary self and draws him to an ethical centre. But the Rousseauist tends, as I have said, to repudiate the very idea of an ethical centre along with the special forms in which it had got itself embedded. Every attempt, whether humanistic or religious, to set up some such centre, to oppose a unifying and centralizing principle to expansive impulse, seems to him arbitrary and artificial. He does not discriminate between the ethical norm or centre that a Sophocles grasps intuitively and the centrality that the pseudo-classicist hopes to achieve by mechanical imitation. He argues from his underlying assumption that the principle of variation is alone vital, that one’s genius and originality are in pretty direct ratio to one’s eccentricity in the literal meaning of the word; and he is therefore ready to affirm his singularity or difference in the face of whatever happens to be established. This attitude, it is worth noting, is quite unlike that of the humorist in the old English sense of the word, who indulges his bent and is at the same time quite unconcerned with any central model that he should imitate and with reference to which he should discipline his oddities. The idiosyncrasy of the Rousseauist is not, like that of the humorist, genial, but defiant. He is strangely self-conscious in his return to the unconscious. In everything, from his vocabulary to the details of his dress, he is eager to emphasize his departure from the norm. Hence the persistent pose and theatricality in so many of the leaders of this movement, in Rousseau himself, for instance, or in Chateaubriand and Byron. As for the lesser figures in the movement their “genius’’ is often chiefly displayed in their devices for calling attention to themselves as the latest and most marvellous births of time; it is only one aspect in short of an art in which the past century, whatever its achievement in the other arts, has easily surpassed all its predecessors—the art of advertising.

One needs always to return, however, if one is to understand the romantic notion of genius, to a consideration of the pseudo-classic decorum against which it is a protest. The gentleman or man of the world (honnête homme) was not like the original genius, anxious to advertise himself , to call attention to his own special note of originality, since his primary concern was with an entirely different problem, with the problem, namely, not of expressing but of humanizing himself; and he could humanize himself, he felt, only by constant reference to the accepted standard of what the normal man should be. He refused to “pride himself on anything”; he was fearful of overemphasis, because the first of virtues in his eyes was a sense of proportion. The total symmetry of life to which the best type of classicist refers back his every impulse, he apprehends intuitively with the aid of his imagination. The symmetry to which the pseudo-classicist refers back his impulses has ceased to be imaginative and has become a mere conformity to an outer code or even to the rules of etiquette; and so, instead of a deep imaginative insight, he gets mere elegance or polish. The unity that a purely external decorum of this kind imposes on life degenerates into a tiresome sameness. It seems an unwarranted denial of the element of wonder and surprise. “Boredom was born one day of uniformity” said La Motte Houdard, who was himself a pseudo-classicist; whereas variety as everybody knows is the spice of life. The romanticist would break up the smooth and tiresome surface of artificial decorum by the pursuit of strangeness. If he can only get his thrill he cares little whether it is probable, whether it bears any relation, that is, to normal human experience. This sacrifice of the probable to the surprising appears, as I said at the outset, in all types of romanticism—whether of action or thought or feeling. The genuine classicist always puts his main stress on design or structure; whereas the main quest of every type of romanticist is rather for the intense and vivid and arresting detail. Take, for instance, the intellectual romanticism that prevailed especially in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In the “witty and conceited” poets of this period the intellect is engaged in a more or less irresponsible vagabondage with the imagination as its free accomplice. The conceits by which a poet of this type displays his “ingenuity’’ (genius) are not structural, are not, that is, referred back to any centre. They stand forth each separately and sharply from the surface of the style (hence known to the French as “points”), and so arrest the reader by their novelty. Their rareness and preciousness, however, are intended to startle the intellect alone. They do not have and are not intended to have any power of sensuous suggestion. The Rousseauistic romanticist, on the other hand, so far from being “metaphysical” strives to be concrete even at the risk of a certain materialism of style, of turning his metaphors into mere images. Like the intellectual romanticist, though in a different way, he wishes to break up the smooth and monotonous surface of life and style, and so he sets up the cult of the picturesque. To understand this cult one needs to remember the opposite extreme of artificial symmetry. One needs to recall, for example, the neo-classicist who complained of the stars in heaven because they were not arranged in symmetrical patterns, or various other neo-classicists who attacked mountains because of their rough and irregular shapes, because of their refusal to submit to the rule and compass. When beauty is conceived in so mechanical a fashion some one is almost certain to wish to “add strangeness’’ to it.

(1) This message came to him in any case straight from German romanticism. See Waltzel, Deutsche Romantik, 22, 151.

]]>https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/12/13/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-ii-part-3/feed/0426Rousseau and Romanticism, Chapter II (Part 2)https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/11/29/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-ii-part-2/
https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/11/29/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-ii-part-2/#commentsWed, 29 Nov 2017 21:15:51 +0000https://www.traditionrestored.com/?p=410I am happy to present the second post of Chapter II of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing...

]]>I am happy to present the second post of Chapter II of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing critique of romanticism as a literary school ever penned. Babbitt (1865-1933) was a cultural and literary critic, serving as Professor of French Literature at Harvard. He and his friend Paul Elmer More (of Princeton) became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism. Babbitt was a pioneer in the study of comparative literature; his writing, as you will see, is notable for its clarity and perspicacity.

CHAPTER II ROMANTIC GENIUS (Part 2)

The scientific and the literary imagination are indeed not quite so sharply contrasted by most of the theorists as might be inferred from what I have said; most of them do not admit that the literary imagination should be entirely free to wander in its own “empire of chimeras.” Even literary imagination, they maintain, should in some measure be under the surveillance of judgment or taste. One should observe, however, that the judgment or taste that is supposed to control or restrict genius is not associated with the imagination. On the contrary, imagination is associated entirely with the element of novelty in things, which means, in the literary domain, with the expansive eagerness of a man to get his own uniqueness uttered. The genius for the Greek, let us remind ourselves, was not the man who was in this sense unique, but the man who perceived the universal; and as the universal can be perceived only with the aid of the imagination, it follows that genius may be defined as imaginative perception of the universal. The universal thus conceived not only gives a centre and purpose to the activity of the imagination, but sets bounds to the free expansion of temperament and impulse, to what came to be known in the eighteenth century as nature.

Kant, who denies genius to the man of science on grounds I have already mentioned, is unable to associate genius in art or literature with the strict discipline of the imagination to a purpose. The imagination must be free and must, he holds, show this freedom not by working but by playing. At the same time Kant had the cool temper of a man of the Enlightenment, and looked with the utmost disapproval on the aberrations that had marked in Germany the age of original genius (die Geniezeit). He was not in the new sense of the word nor indeed in any sense, an enthusiast. And so he wished the reason, or judgment, to keep control over the imagination without disturbing its free play; art is to have a purpose which is at the same time not a purpose. The distinctions by which he works out the supposed relationship between judgment and imagination are at once difficult and unreal. One can indeed put one’s finger here more readily perhaps than elsewhere on the central impotence of the whole Kantian system. Once discredit tradition and outer authority and then set up as a substitute a reason that is divorced from the imagination and so lacks the support of supersensuous insight, and reason will prove unable to maintain its hegemony. When the imagination has ceased to pull in accord with the reason in the service of a reality that is set above them both, it is sure to become the accomplice of expansive impulse, and mere reason is not strong enough to prevail over this union of imagination and desire. Reason needs some driving power behind it, a driving power that, when working in alliance with the imagination, it gets from insight. To suppose that man will long rest content with mere naked reason as his guide is to forget that “illusion is the queen of the human heart”; it is to revive the stoical error. Schiller, himself a Kantian, felt this rationalistic rigor and coldness of his master, and so sought, while retaining the play theory of art, to put behind the cold reason of Kant the driving power it lacked; for this driving power he looked not to a supersensuous reality, not to insight in short, but to emotion. He takes appropriately the motto for his “Esthetic Letters” from Rousseau: Si c’est la raison qui fait l’homme c’est le sentiment qui le conduit [If it is reason that makes the man it is feeling that drives him.]. He retains Kant’s play theory of art without even so much offset to this play as is implied in Kant’s “purposiveness without purpose.” The nobility of Schiller’s intentions is beyond question. At the same time, by encouraging the notion that it is possible to escape from neo-classical didacticism only by eliminating masculine purpose from art, he opens the way for the worst perversions of the aesthete, above all for the divorce of art from ethical reality. In art, according to Schiller, both imagination and feeling should be free and spontaneous, and the result of all this freedom, as he sees it, will be perfectly “ideal.” His suspicion of a purpose is invincible. As soon as anything has a purpose it ceases to be aesthetic and in the same measure suffers a loss of dignity. Thus the aesthetic moment of the lion, he says, is when he roars not with any definite design, but out of sheer lustiness, and for the pure pleasure of roaring.

One may assume safely the aesthetic attitude, or what amounts to the same thing, allow one’s self to be guided by feeling only on the assumption that feeling is worthy of trust. As appears in the very motto he took for his “Aesthetic Letters” Schiller was helped to this faith in man’s native goodness by Rousseau. We need to pause for a moment at this point and consider the background of this belief which finds not only in Schiller but in Rousseau himself, with whom it is usually associated, a rather late expression. The movement that took its rise in the eighteenth century involves, we should recollect, a break not with one but with two traditions—the classical and the Christian. If the plea for genius and originality is to be largely explained as a protest against the mechanical imitation and artificial decorum of a certain type of classicist, the assertion of man’s natural goodness is to be understood rather as a rebound from the doctrine of total depravity that was held by the more austere type of Christian [e.g., Lutheran, Calvinist]. This doctrine had even in the early centuries of the faith awakened certain protests like that of Pelagius, but for an understanding of the Rousseauistic protest one does not need to go behind the great deistic movement of the early eighteenth century. God, instead of being opposed to nature, is conceived by the deist as a power that expresses his goodness and loveliness through nature. The oppressive weight of fear that the older theology had laid upon the human spirit is thus gradually lifted. Man begins to discover harmonies instead of discords in himself and outer nature. He not only sees virtue in instinct but inclines to turn virtue itself into a “sense,” or instinct. And this means in practice to put emotional expansion in the place of spiritual concentration at the basis of life and morals. In studying this drift towards an aesthetic or sentimental morality one may most conveniently take one’s point of departure in certain English writers of deistic tendency, especially in Shaftesbury and his disciple Hutcheson. Considered purely as an initiator, Shaftesbury is probably more important than Rousseau. His influence ramifies out in every direction, notably into Germany.

The central achievement of Shaftesbury from a purely psychological point of view may be said to be his transformation of conscience from an inner check into an expansive emotion. He is thus enabled to set up an aesthetic substitute not merely for traditional religion but for traditional humanism. He undermines insidiously decorum, the central doctrine of the classicist, at the very time that he seems to be defending it. For decorum also implies a control upon the expansive instincts of human nature, and Shaftesbury is actually engaged in rehabilitating “nature,” and insinuating that it does not need any control. He attains this expansiveness by putting aesthetic in the place of spiritual perception, and so merging more or less completely the good and the true with the beautiful. He thus points the way very directly to Rousseau’s rejection of both inner and outer control in the name of man’s natural goodness. Once accept Shaftesbury’s transformation of conscience and one is led almost inevitably to look on everything that is expansive as natural or vital and on everything that restricts expansion as conventional or artificial. Villers wrote to Madame de Stael (4 May, 1803) : “The fundamental and creative idea of all your work has been to show primitive, incorruptible, naive, passionate nature in conflict with the barriers and shackles of conventional life. . . . Note that this is also the guiding idea of the author of ‘Werther.’ ” This contrast between nature and convention is indeed almost the whole of Rousseauism. In permitting his expansive impulses to be disciplined by either humanism or religion man has fallen away from nature much as in the old theology he has fallen away from God, and the famous “return to nature” means in practice the emancipation of the ordinary or temperamental self that had been thus artificially controlled. This throwing off of the yoke of both Christian and classical discipline in the name of temperament is the essential aspect of the movement in favor of original genius. The genius does not look to any pattern that is set above his ordinary spontaneous ego and imitate it. On the contrary, he attains to the self-expression that other men, intimidated by convention, weakly forego.

In thus taking a stand for self-expression, the original genius is in a sense on firm ground—at least so far as the mere rationalist or the late and degenerate classicist is concerned. No conventions are final, no rules can set arbitrary limits to creation. Reality cannot be locked up in any set of formulae. The element of change and novelty in things, as the romanticists are never tired of repeating, is at once vital and inexhaustible. Wherever we turn, we encounter, as a romantic authority, Jacob Boehme, declares, “abysmal, unsearchable and infinite multiplicity.” Perhaps not since the beginning of the world have two men or indeed two leaves or two blades of grass been exactly alike. Out of a thousand men shaving, as Dr. Johnson himself remarked, no two will shave in just the same way. A person carries his uniqueness even into his thumbprint—as a certain class in the community has learned to its cost. But though all things are ineffably different they are at the same time ineffably alike. And this oneness in things is, no less than the otherwiseness, a matter of immediate perception. This universal implication of the one in the many is found even more marked than elsewhere in the heart of the individual. Each man has his idiosyncrasy (literally his “private mixture”). But in addition to his complexion, his temperamental or private self, every man has a self that he possesses in common with other men. Even the man who is most filled with his own uniqueness, or “genius,” a Rousseau, for example, assumes this universal self in every word he utters. “Jove nods to Jove behind us as we talk.” The word character, one may note, is ambiguous, inasmuch as it may refer either to the idiosyncratic or to the universal human element in a man’s dual nature. For example, an original genius like William Blake not only uses the word character in a different sense from Aristotle—he cannot even understand the Aristotelian usage. “Aristotle,” he complains, “says characters are either good or bad; now Goodness or Badness has nothing to do with Character. An apple tree, a pear tree, a horse, a lion are Characters; but a good apple tree or a bad is an apple tree still, etc.” But character as Aristotle uses the word implies something that man possesses and that a horse or tree does not possess—the power namely to deliberate and choose. A man has a good or bad character, he is ethical or unethical, as one may say from the Greek word for character in this sense (ηθος), according to the quality of his choice as it appears in what he actually does. This distinction between a man’s private, peculiar character (χαρακτηρ) and the character he possesses when judged with reference to something more general than his own complexion is very similar to the French distinction between the sens propre and the sens commun.

The general sense or norm that is opposed to mere temperament and impulse may rest upon the ethos of a particular time and country—the traditional habits and customs that the Rousseauist is wont to dismiss as “artificial”—or it may rest in varying degrees upon immediate perception. For example, the Ismene and Antigone of Sophocles are both ethical; but Ismene would I abide by the law of the state, whereas Antigone opposes to this law something still more universal—the “unwritten laws of heaven.” This insight of Antigone into a moral order that is set not only above her ordinary self but above the convention of her time and country is something very immediate, something achieved, as I shall try to show more fully later, with the aid of the imagination.

It is scarcely necessary to add that such a perfect example of the ethical imagination as one finds in Antigone—the imagination that works concentric with the human law—is rare. In actual life for one Antigone who obeys the “unwritten laws of heaven” there will be a thousand Ismenes who will be guided in their moral choices by the law of the community. This law, the convention of a particular place and time, is always but a very imperfect image, a mere shadow indeed of the unwritten law which being above the ordinary rational level is, in a sense to be explained later, infinite and incapable of final formulation. And yet men are forced if only on practical grounds to work out some approximation to this law as a barrier to the unchained appetites of the individual. The elements that enter into any particular attempt to circumscribe the individual in the interests of the community are very mixed and in no small measure relative. Yet the things that any group of men have come together about—their conventions in the literal meaning of the word—even the tabus of a savage tribe, are sure to reflect, however inadequately, the element of oneness in man, the element which is opposed to expansive impulse, and which is no less real, no less a matter of immediate experience, than the element of irreducible difference. The general sense therefore should never be sacrificed lightly to the sense of the individual. Tabu, however inferior it may be to insight, deserves to rank higher after all than mere temperament.

The original genius proceeds upon the opposite assumption. Everything that limits temperamental expansion is dismissed as either artificial or mechanical; everything on the contrary that makes for the emancipation of temperament, and so for variety and difference, he welcomes as vital, dynamic, creative. Now, speaking not metaphysically but practically and experimentally, man may, as I have said, follow two main paths: he may develop his ethical self—the self that lays hold of unity—or he may put his main emphasis on the element within him and without him that is associated with novelty and change. In direct proportion as he turns his attention to the infinite manifoldness of things he experiences wonder; if on the other hand he attends to the unity that underlies the manifoldness and that likewise transcends him, he experiences awe. As a man grows religious, awe comes more and more to take the place in him of wonder. The humanist is less averse from the natural order and its perpetual gushing forth of novelties than the man who is religious, yet even the humanist refuses to put his final emphasis on wonder (his motto is rather nil admirari [to be surprised by nothing]). To illustrate concretely, Dr. Johnson can scarcely conceal his disdain for the wonderful, but being a genuinely religious spirit, is very capable of awe. Commenting on Yalden’s line

Awhile th’ Almighty wondering stood,

Dr. Johnson remarks: “He ought to have remembered that Infinite Knowledge can never wonder. All wonder is the effect of novelty upon Ignorance.” Granted the justness of the remark, Johnson seems inclined at times to forget how wide is the gap in this respect between us and the Almighty and therefore to be unduly hostile to the element of wonder. To take the opposite case, it is not easy to discover in either the personality or writings of Poe an atom of awe or reverence. On the other hand he both experiences wonder and seeks in his art to be a pure wondersmith.

]]>https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/11/29/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-ii-part-2/feed/2410Rousseau and Romanticism, Chapter II (Part 1)https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/11/09/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-ii-part-1/
https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/11/09/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-ii-part-1/#respondThu, 09 Nov 2017 18:43:51 +0000https://www.traditionrestored.com/?p=386I am happy to present the first post of Chapter II of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing...

]]>I am happy to present the first post of Chapter II of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing critique of romanticism as a literary school ever penned. Babbitt (1865-1933) was a cultural and literary critic, serving as Professor of French Literature at Harvard. He and his friend Paul Elmer More (of Princeton) became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism. Babbitt was a pioneer in the study of comparative literature; his writing, as you will see, is notable for its clarity and perspicacity.

CHAPTER II ROMANTIC GENIUS (Part 1)

Romanticism, it has been remarked, is all that is not Voltaire. The clash between Rousseau and Voltaire is indeed not merely the clash between two men, it is the clash between two incompatible views of life. Voltaire is the end of the old world, as Goethe has put it, Rousseau the beginning of the new.

One is not to suppose, however, that Voltaire was a consistent champion of the past. He is indeed with all his superficial clearness one of the most incoherent of writers At the same time that he defended classical tradition he attacked Christian tradition, spreading abroad a spirit of mockery and irreverence that tended to make every traditional belief impossible. The “reason” to which he appeals has all the shallowness that I have noticed in the “reason” of the eighteenth century. Though he does not fall into the Cartesian excess of abstract reasoning, and though the good sense that he most often understands by reason is admirably shrewd within certain bounds, he nevertheless falls very far short of the standards of a true classicism. He delights in the philosophy of Locke and has little sense for Greek philosophy or for the higher aspects of Greek literature. He is quite lacking in the quality of imagination that is needful if one is to communicate with what is above the ordinary rational level. So far from being capable of high seriousness he is scarcely capable of ordinary seriousness. And so the nobility, elegance, imitation, and decorum that he is constantly preaching have about them a taint of formalism. Perhaps this taint appears most conspicuously in his conception of decorum. A man may be willing to impose restrictions on his ordinary self—and every type of decorum is restrictive—if he is asked to do so for some adequate end. The end of the decorum that an Aristotle, for example, would impose is that one may become more human and therefore, as he endeavors to show in a highly positive fashion, happier.* The only art and literature that will please a man who has thus become human through the observance of true decorum is an art and literature that are themselves human and decorous. Voltaire for his part wishes to subject art and literature to an elaborate set of restrictions in the name of decorum, but these restrictions are not joined to any adequate end. The only reward he holds out to those who observe all these restrictions is “The merit of difficulty overcome.” At bottom, like so many of the Jesuits from whom he received his education, he looks upon art as a game—a very ingenious and complicated game. The French muse he compares to a person executing a difficult clog dance on a tight rope, and he argues from this comparison, not that the French muse should assume a less constrained posture, but that she should on the contrary be exemplary to the nations. No wonder the romanticists and even Dr. Johnson demurred at Voltaire’s condemnation of Shakespeare in the name of this type of decorum.

Voltaire is therefore, in spite of all his dazzling gifts, one of the most compromising advocates of classicism. Pope also had eminent merits, but from the truly classical point of view he is about as inadequate as Voltaire ; and this is important to remember because English romanticism tends to be all that is not Pope. The English romanticists revolted especially from the poetic diction of which Pope was one of the chief sources, and poetic diction, with its failure to distinguish between nobility of language and the language of the nobility, is only an aspect of artificial decorum. However, the revolt from poetic diction and decorum in general is not the central aspect of the great movement that resulted in the eclipse of the wit and man of the world and in the emergence of the original genius. What the genius wanted was spontaneity, and spontaneity, as he understood it, involves a denial, not merely of decorum, but of something that, as I have said, goes deeper than decorum—namely the doctrine of imitation. According to Voltaire genius is only judicious imitation. According to Rousseau the prime mark of genius is refusal to imitate. The movement away from imitation, however, had already got well started before it thus came to a picturesque head in the clash between Rousseau and Voltaire, and if we wish to understand this movement we need to take a glance at its beginnings—especially in England.

There are reasons why this supposed opposition between imitation and genius should have been felt in England more keenly than elsewhere. The doctrine of imitation in its neo-classical form did not get established there until about the time of Dryden. In the meanwhile England had had a great creative literature in which the freedom and spontaneity of the imagination had not been cramped by a too strict imitation of models. Dryden himself, though he was doing more than any one else to promote the new correctness that was coming in from France, felt that this correctness was no equivalent for the Elizabethan inspiration. The structure that he and his contemporaries were erecting might be more regular, but lacked the boldness and originality of that reared by the “giant race before the flood”:

Our age was cultivated thus at length;
But what we gained in skill we lost in strength.
Our builders were with want of genius cursed;
The second temple was not like the first. [From verses prefixed to Congreve’s Double Dealer.]

This contrast between the imitator and the inspired original was developed by Addison in a paper (“Spectator” 160) that was destined to be used against the very school to which he himself belonged. For Addison was in his general outlook a somewhat tame Augustan, nevertheless he exalts the “natural geniuses” who have something “nobly wild and extravagant” in them above the geniuses who have been “refined by conversation, reflection and the reading of the most polite authors”; who have “formed themselves by rules and submitted the greatness of their natural talents to the corrections and restraints of art.” “The great danger in these latter kind of geniuses is lest they cramp their own abilities too much by imitation, and form themselves altogether upon models, without giving full play to their own natural parts. An imitation of the best authors is not to compare with a good original; and I believe we may observe that very few writers make an extraordinary figure in the world, who have not something in their way of thinking or expressing themselves that is peculiar to them, and entirely their own.”

Another main influence that was making against the doctrine of imitation was also largely of English origin. This was the idea of progress though scientific observation and experiment. As a result of this type of positivism, discovery was being added to discovery. Science was kindling man’s imagination and opening up before him what he really craves, the vista of an endless advance. Why should not literature likewise do something new and original instead of sticking forever in the same rut of imitation? In its Greek form the doctrine of imitation was, as I have tried to show, not only flexible and progressive, but in its own way, positive and experimental. But in modern times the two main forms of imitation, the classical and the Christian, have worked within the limits imposed by tradition and traditional models. The imitation of models, the Christian imitation of Christ, let us say, or the classical imitation of Horace, may indeed be a very vital thing, the imitation of one soul by another soul; but when carried out in this vital way, the two main forms of imitation tend to clash, and the compromise between them, as I have already said, resulted in a good deal of formalism. By its positive and critical method science was undermining every traditional belief. Both the Christian and the classical formalists would have been the first to deny that the truths of imitation for which they stood could be divorced from tradition and likewise put on a positive and critical basis. The fact is indubitable in any case that the discrediting of tradition has resulted in a progressive lapse from the religious and the humanistic to the naturalistic level. An equally indubitable fact is that scientific or rationalistic naturalism tended from the early eighteenth century to produce emotional naturalism, and that both forms of naturalism were hostile to the doctrine of imitation.

The trend away from the doctrine of imitation towards emotional naturalism finds revolutionary expression in the literary field in such a work as Young’s “Conjectures on Original Composition” (1759). Addison had asserted as we have seen, the superiority of what is original in a man, of what comes to him spontaneously, over what he acquires by conscious effort and culture. Young, a personal friend of Addison’s, develops this contrast between the “natural” and the “artificial” to its extreme consequences. “Modern writers,” he says, “have a choice to make. . . . They may soar in the regions of liberty, or move in the soft fetters of easy imitation.” “An original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made; imitations are often a sort of manufacture, wrought up by those mechanics, art and labor, out of preëxistent materials not their own.” “We may as well grow good by another’s virtue, or fat by another’s food, as famous by another’s thought.” One evidence that we are still living in the movement of which Young is one of the initiators is that his treatise will not only seem to most of us a very spirited piece of writing—that it certainly is—but doctrinally sound. And yet it is only one of those documents very frequent in literary history which lack intrinsic soundness, but which can be explained if not justified as a recoil from an opposite extreme. The unsoundness of Young’s work comes out clearly if one compares it with the treatise on the “Sublime” attributed to Longinus which is not a mere protest against a previous excess, but a permanently acceptable treatment of the same problem of genius and inspiration. Longinus exalts genius, but is at the same time regardful of culture and tradition, and even emphasizes the relation between inspiration and the imitation of models. Young insinuates, on the contrary, that one is aided in becoming a genius by being brainless and ignorant. “Some are pupils of nature only, nor go further to school.” “Many a genius probably there has been which could neither write nor read” It follows almost inevitably from these premises that genius flourishes most in the primitive ages of society before originality has been crushed beneath the superincumbent weight of culture and critics have begun their pernicious activities. Young did not take this step himself, but it was promptly taken by others on the publication of the Ossianic poems (1762). Ossian is at once added to the list of great originals already enumerated by Addison—Homer, Pindar, the patriarchs of the Old Testament and Shakespeare (whom Young like the later romanticists opposes to Pope). “Poetry,” says Diderot, summing up a whole movement, “calls for something enormous, barbaric and savage.”

This exaltation of the virtues of the primitive ages is simply the projection into a mythical past of a need that the man of the eighteenth century feels in the present—the need to let himself go. This is what he understands by his “return to nature.” A whole revolution is implied in this reinterpretation of the word nature. To follow nature in the classical sense is to imitate what is normal and representative in man and so to become decorous. To be natural in the new sense one must begin by getting rid of imitation and decorum. Moreover, for the classicist, nature and reason are synonymous. The primitivist, on the other hand, means by nature the spontaneous play of impulse and temperament, and inasmuch as this liberty is hindered rather than helped by reason, he inclines to look on reason, not as the equivalent but as the opposite of nature.

If one is to understand this development, one should note carefully how certain uses of the word reason, not merely by the neo-classicists but by the anti-traditionalists, especially in religion, tended to produce this denial of reason. It is a curious fact that some of those who were attacking the Christian religion in the name of reason, were themselves aware that mere reason, whether one understood by the word abstract reasoning or uninspired good sense, does not satisfy, that in the long run man is driven either to rise higher or to sink lower than reason. St. Evremond, for example, prays nature to deliver man from the doubtful middle state in which she has placed him—either to “lift him up to angelic radiance,” or else to “sink him to the instinct of simple animals.” (1) Since the ascending path, the path that led to angelic radiance, seemed to involve the acceptance of a mass of obsolete dogma, man gradually inclined to sink below the rational level and to seek to recover the “instinct of simple animals.” Another and still more fundamental fact that some of the rationalists perceived and that militated against their own position, is that the dominant element in man is not reason, but imagination, or if one prefers, the element of illusion. “Illusion,” said Voltaire himself, “is the queen of the human heart.” The great achievement of tradition at its best was to be at once a limit and a support to both reason and imagination and so to unite them in a common allegiance. In the new movement, at the same time that reason was being encouraged by scientific method to rise up in revolt against tradition, imagination was being fascinated and drawn to the naturalistic level by scientific discovery and the vista of an endless advance that it opened up. A main problem, therefore, for the student of this movement is to determine what forms of imaginative activity are possible on the naturalistic level. A sort of understanding was reached on this point by different types of naturalists in the course of the eighteenth century. One form of imagination, it was agreed, should be displayed in science, another form in art and literature. The scientific imagination should be controlled by judgment and work in strict subordination to the facts. In art and literature, on the other hand, the imagination should be free. Genius and originality are indeed in strict ratio to this freedom. “In the fairy land of fancy,” says Young, “genius may wander wild; there it has a creative power, and may reign arbitrarily over its own empire of chimeras.” (The empire of chimeras was later to become the tower of ivory.) This sheer indiscipline of the literary imagination might seem in contrast with the discipline of the scientific imagination an inferiority; but such was not the view of the partisans of original genius. Kant, indeed, who was strongly influenced in his “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” by these English theorists, inclined to deny genius to the man of science for the very reason that his imagination is so strictly controlled. The fact would seem to be that a great scientist, a Newton let us say, has as much right to be accounted a genius as Shakespeare. The inferiority of the genius of a Newton compared with that of a Shakespeare lies in a certain coldness. Scientific genius is thus cold because it operates in a region less relevant to man than poetic genius; it is, in Bagehot’s phrase, more remote from the “hearth of the soul.” [To be continued.]

* In regard to Babbitt’s idea of the “critical spirit,” the following may be taken as a caveat: “Theoretically speaking, man is capable of acquiring a full knowledge of the moral law, which is, as we have seen, nothing but the dictates of reason properly exercised. Actually, taking into consideration the power of passion, prejudice, and other influences which cloud the understanding or pervert the will, one can safely say that man, unaided by supernatural revelation, would not acquire a full and correct knowledge of the contents of the natural law (cf. Vatican Council [First], Sess. III, cap. ii). In proof we need but recall that the noblest ethical teaching of pagans, such as the systems of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, was disfigured by its approbation of shockingly immoral actions and practices.”—From “Natural Law” in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).

]]>https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/11/09/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-ii-part-1/feed/0386Rousseau and Romanticism, Chapter I (Part 5)https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/10/26/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-part-5/
https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/10/26/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-part-5/#commentsThu, 26 Oct 2017 17:00:26 +0000https://www.traditionrestored.com/?p=374I am happy to present the fifth and final post of Chapter I of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the...

]]>I am happy to present the fifth and final post of Chapter I of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing critique of romanticism as a literary school ever penned. Babbitt (1865-1933) was a cultural and literary critic, serving as Professor of French Literature at Harvard. He and his friend Paul Elmer More (of Princeton) became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism. Babbitt was a pioneer in the study of comparative literature; his writing, as you will see, is notable for its clarity and perspicacity.

CHAPTER I

THE TERMS CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC (PART 5)

IV (Concluded)

Before considering the value of the method chosen by Rousseau and the romanticists for breaking up the “tiresome old heavens” and escaping from smugness and stuffiness one should note that the lack of originality and genius which they lamented in the eighteenth century—especially in that part of it known as the Enlightenment—was not due entirely to pseudo-classic formalism. At least two other main currents entered into the Enlightenment: first the empirical and utilitarianism current that goes back to Francis Bacon; and some would say to Roger Bacon; and secondly the rationalistic current that goes back to Descartes. English empiricism gained international vogue in the philosophy of Locke, and Locke denies any supersensuous element in human nature to which one may have access with the aid of the imagination or in any other way. Locke’s method of precise naturalistic observation is in itself legitimate ; for man is plainly subject to the natural law. What is not truly empirical is to bring the whole of human nature under this law. One can do this only by piecing out precise observation and experiment with dogmatic rationalism. One side of Locke may therefore be properly associated with the father of modern rationalists, Descartes. The attempt of the rationalist to lock up life in some set of formulae produces in the imaginative man a feeling of oppression. He gasps for light and air. The very tracing of cause and effect and in general the use of the analytical faculties—and this is to fly to the opposite extreme—came to be condemned by the romanticists as inimical to the imagination. Not only do they make endless attacks on Locke, but at times they assail even Newton for having mechanized life, though Newton’s comparison of himself to a child picking up pebbles on the seashore would seem to show that he had experienced “the feeling infinite.”

The elaboration of science into a closed system with the aid of logic and pure mathematics is as a matter of fact to be associated with Descartes rather than with Newton. Neither Newton nor Descartes, one scarcely needs add, wished to subject man entirely to the natural law and the nexus of physical causes; they were not in short determinists. Yet the superficial rationalism of the Enlightenment was in the main of Cartesian origin. This Cartesian influence ramifies in so many directions and is related at so many points to the literary movement, and there has been so much confusion about this relationship, that we need to pause here to make a few distinctions.

Perhaps what most strikes one in the philosophy of Descartes is its faith in logic and abstract reasoning and the closely allied processes of mathematical demonstration. Anything that is not susceptible of clear proof in this logical and almost mathematical sense is to be rejected. Now this Cartesian notion of clearness is fatal to a true classicism. The higher reality, the true classicist maintains, cannot be thus demonstrated; it can only be grasped, and then never completely, through a veil of imaginative illusion. Boileau is reported to have said that Descartes had cut the throat of poetry; and this charge is justified in so far as the Cartesian requires from poetry a merely logical clearness. This conception of clearness was also a menace to the classicism of the seventeenth century which rested in the final analysis not on logic but on tradition. This appeared very clearly in the early phases of the quarrel between ancients and moderns when literary Cartesians like Perrault and Fontenelle attacked classical dogma in the name of reason. In fact one may ask if any doctrine has ever appeared so fatal to every form of tradition—not merely literary but also religious and political—as Cartesianism. The rationalist of the eighteenth century was for dismissing as “prejudice” everything that could not give a clear account of itself in the Cartesian sense. This riot of abstract reasoning (la raison raisonnante) that prepared the way for the Revolution has been identified by Taine and others with the classic spirit. A more vicious confusion has seldom gained currency in criticism. It is true that the French have mixed a great deal of logic with their conception of the classic spirit, but that is because they have mixed a great deal of logic with everything. I have already mentioned their tendency to substitute a logical for an imaginative verisimilitude; and strenuously logical classicists may be found in France from Chapelain to Brunetière. Yet the distinction that should keep us from confusing mere logic with the classic spirit was made by a Frenchman who was himself violently logical and also a great geometrician—Pascal. One should keep distinct, says Pascal, the esprit de géométrie and the esprit de finesse. The esprit de finesse is not, like the esprit de géométrie, abstract, but very concrete. (1) So far as a man possesses the esprit de finesse he is enabled to judge correctly of the ordinary facts of life and of the relationships between man and man. But these judgments rest upon such a multitude of delicate perceptions that he is frequently unable to account for them logically. It is to intuitive good sense and not to the esprit de géométrie that the gentleman (honnête homme) of the neo-classical period owed his fine tact. Pascal himself finally took a stand against reason as understood both by the Cartesian and by the man of the world. Unaided reason he held is unable to prevail against the deceits of the imagination; it needs the support of intuition—an intuition that he identifies with grace, thus making it inseparable from the most austere form of Christianity. The “heart,” he says, and this is the name he gives to intuition, “has reasons of which the reason knows nothing.” A Plato or an Aristotle would not have understood this divorce between reason and intuition. (2)

Pascal seems to get his insight only by flouting ordinary good sense. He identifies this insight with a type of theological dogma [Jansenist] of which good sense was determined to be rid; and so it tended to get rid of the insight along with the dogma. Classical dogma also seemed at times to be in opposition to the intuitive good sense of the man of the world. The man of the world therefore often inclined to assail both the classical and the Christian tradition in the name of good sense, just as the Cartesian inclined to assail these traditions in the name of abstract reason. Perhaps the best exponent of anti-traditional good sense in the seventeenth century was Molière. He vindicated nature, and by nature he still meant in the main normal human nature, from arbitrary constraints of every kind whether imposed by an ascetic Christianity or by a narrow and pedantic classicism. Unfortunately Molière is too much on the side of the opposition. He does not seem to put his good sense into the service of some positive insight of his own. Good sense may be of many degrees according to the order of facts of which it has a correct perception. The order of facts in human nature that Molière’s good sense perceived is not the highest and so this good sense appears at times too ready to justify the bourgeois against the man who has less timid and conventional views. So at least Rousseau thought when he made his famous attack on Molière [in his Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles]. Rousseau assailed Molière in the name of instinct as Pascal would have assailed him in the name of insight, and fought sense with sensibility. The hostility of Rousseau to Molière, according to M. Faguet, is that of a romantic Bohemian to a philistine of genius [Rousseau contre Molière]. One hesitates to call Molière a philistine, but one may at least grant M. Faguet that Molière’s good sense is not always sufficiently inspired.

I have been trying to build up a background that will make clear why the reason of the eighteenth century (whether we understand by reason logic or good sense) had come to be superficial and therefore oppressive to the imagination. It is only with reference to this “reason” that one can understand the romantic revolt. But neo-classical reason itself can be understood only with reference to its background—as a recoil namely from a previous romantic excess. This excess was manifested not only in the intellectual romanticism [often called Mannerism, typified by the Metaphysical poets in England] of which I have already spoken, but in the cult of the romantic deed that had flourished in the Middle Ages. This cult and the literature that reflected it continued to appeal, even to the cultivated, well on into the neo-classical period. It was therefore felt necessary to frame a definition of reason that should be a rebuke to the extravagance and improbability of the mediaeval romances. When men became conscious in the eighteenth century of the neo-classical meagerness on the imaginative side they began to look back with a certain envy to the free efflorescence of fiction in the Middle Ages. They began to ask themselves with Hurd whether the reason and correctness they had won were worth the sacrifice of a “world of fine fabling” [Letters on Chivalry and Romance]. We must not, however, like Heine and many others, look on the romantic movement as merely a return to the Middle Ages. We have seen that the men of the Middle Ages themselves understood by romance not simply their own kind of speech and writing in contrast with what was written in Latin, but a kind of writing in which the pursuit of strangeness and adventure predominated. This pursuit of strangeness and adventure will be found to predominate in all types of romanticism. The type of romanticism, however, which came in towards the end of the eighteenth century did not, even when professedly mediaeval, simply revert to the older types. It was primarily not a romanticism of thought or of action, the types we have encountered thus far, but a romanticism of feeling, The beginnings of this emotional romanticism antedate considerably the application of the word romantic to a particular literary school. Before considering how the word came to be thus applied we shall need to take a glance at eighteenth-century sentimentalism, especially at the plea for genius and originality that, from about the middle of the century on, were opposed to the tameness and servile imitation of the neo-classicists.

(1) For a similar distinction in Aristotle see Eth. Nic., 1143 b.

(2) The Platonic and Aristotelian reason or mind (νους) contains an element of intuition.

]]>https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/10/26/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-part-5/feed/2374Rousseau and Romanticism, Chapter I (Part 4)https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/10/03/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-part-4/
https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/10/03/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-part-4/#respondTue, 03 Oct 2017 20:40:17 +0000https://www.traditionrestored.com/?p=364I am happy to present the fourth post of Chapter I of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing...

]]>I am happy to present the fourth post of Chapter I of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing critique of romanticism as a literary school ever penned. Babbitt (1865-1933) was a cultural and literary critic, serving as Professor of French Literature at Harvard. He and his friend Paul Elmer More (of Princeton) became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism. Babbitt was a pioneer in the study of comparative literature; his writing, as you will see, is notable for its clarity and perspicacity.

CHAPTER I

THE TERMS CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC (Part 4)

IV

After this attempt to define briefly with the help of the Greeks the classical spirit in its essence we should be prepared to understand more clearly the way in which this spirit was modified in neo-classical times, especially in France. The first thing that strikes one about the classicism of this period is that it does not rest on immediate perception like that of the Greeks but on outer authority. The merely dogmatic and traditional classicist gave a somewhat un-Greek meaning to the doctrines of nature and imitation. Why imitate nature directly, said Scaliger, when we have in Virgil a second nature? Imitation thus came to mean the imitation of certain outer models and the following of rules based on these models. Now it is well that one who aims at excellence in any field should begin by a thorough assimilation of the achievements of his great predecessors in this field. Unfortunately the neo-classical theorist tended to impose a multitude of precepts that were based on what was external rather than on what was vital in the practice of his models. In so far the lesson of form that the great ancients can always teach any one who approaches them in the right spirit degenerated into formalism. This formalistic turn given to the doctrine of imitation was felt from the outset to be a menace to originality; to be incompatible, and everything hinges at last on this point, with the spontaneity of the imagination. There was an important reaction headed by men like Boileau, within the neo-classical movement itself, against the oppression of the intuitive side of human nature by mere dogma and authority, above all against the notion that “regularity” is in itself any guarantee of literary excellence. A school of rules was succeeded by a school of taste. Yet even to the end the neo-classicist was too prone to reject as unnatural or even monstrous everything that did not fit into one of the traditional pigeon-holes. One must grant, indeed, that much noble work was achieved under the neo-classical dispensation, work that shows a genuine insight into the universal, but it is none the less evident that the view of the imagination held during this period has a formalistic taint.

This taint in neo-classicism is due not merely to its dogmatic and mechanical way of dealing with the doctrine of imitation but also to the fact that it had to reconcile classical with Christian dogma; and the two antiquities, classical and Christian, if interpreted vitally and in the spirit, were in many respects divergent and in some respects contradictory. The general outcome of the attempts at reconciliation made by the literary casuists of Italy and France was that Christianity should have a monopoly of truth and classicism a monopoly of fiction. For the true classicist, it will be remembered, the two things are inseparable—he gets at his truth through a veil of fiction. Many of the neo-classicists came to conceive of art as many romanticists were to conceive of it later as a sort of irresponsible game or play, but they were, it must be confessed, very inferior to the romanticists in the spontaneity of their fiction. They went for this fiction as for everything else to the models, and this meant in practice that they employed the pagan myths, not as imaginative symbols of a higher reality—it is still possible to employ them in that way—but merely in Boileau’s phrase as “traditional ornaments’’ (ornements reçu). The neo-classicist to be sure might so employ his “fiction’’ as to inculcate a moral; in that case he is only too likely to give us instead of the living symbol, dead allegory; instead of high seriousness, its caricature, didacticism. The traditional stock of fiction became at last so intolerably trite as to be rejected even by some of the late neo-classicists. “The rejection and contempt of fiction,’’ said Dr. Johnston (who indulged in it himself on occasion) “is rational and manly.” But to reject fiction in the larger sense is to miss the true driving power in human nature—the imagination. Before concluding, however, that Dr. Johnson had no notion of the rôle of the imagination one should read his attack on the theory of the three unities [in his Preface to Shakespeare] which was later to be turned to account by the romanticists.

Now the three unities may be defended on an entirely legitimate ground—on the ground namely that they make for concentration, a prime virtue in the drama; but the grounds on which they were actually imposed on the drama, especially in connection with the Quarrel of the Cid, illustrate the corruption of another main classical doctrine, that of probability or verisimilitude. In his dealings with probability as in his dealings with imitation, the neo-classical formalist did not allow sufficiently for the element of illusion. What he required from the drama in the name of probability was not the “illusion of a higher reality,” but strict logic or even literal deception. He was not capable of a poetic faith, not willing to suspend his disbelief on passing from the world of ordinary fact to the world of artistic creation. Goethe was thinking especially of the neo-classical French when he said: “As for the French, they will always be arrested by their reason. They do not recognize that the imagination has its own laws which are and always must be problematic for the reason.”

It was also largely under French influence that the doctrine of decorum, which touches probability at many points, was turned aside from its true meaning. Decorum is in a way the peculiar doctrine of the classicist, is in Milton’s phrase “the grand masterpiece to observe.” The doctrines of the universal and the imitation of the universal go deeper indeed than decorum, so much deeper that they are shared by classicism with religion. The man who aspires to live religiously must no less than the humanist look to some model set above his ordinary self and imitate it. But though the classicist at his best meditates, he does not, like the seeker after religious perfection, see in meditation an end in itself but rather a support for the mediatory virtues, the virtues of the man who would live to the best advantage in this world rather than renounce it; and these virtues may be said to be summed up in decorum. For the best type of Greek humanist, a Sophocles let us say, decorum was a vital and immediate thing. But there enters into decorum even from the time of the Alexandrian Greeks, and still more into French neo-classical decorum, a marked element of artificiality. The all-roundness and fine symmetry, the poise and dignity that come from working within the bounds of the human law, were taken to be the privilege not of man in general but of a special social class. Take for instance verbal decorum: the French neo-classicists assumed that if the speech of poetry is to be noble and highly serious it must coincide with the speech of the aristocracy. As Nisard puts it, they confused nobility of language with the language of the nobility. Decorum was thus more or less merged with etiquette, so that the standards of the stage and of literature in general came to coincide, as Rousseau complains, with those of the drawing-room. More than anything else this narrowing of decorum marks the decline from the classic to the pseudo-classic, from form to formalism.

While condemning pseudo-decorum one should remember that even a Greek would have seen something paradoxical in a poem like Goethe’s “Hermann und Dorothea’’ and its attempt to invest with epic grandeur the affairs of villagers and peasants. After all, dignity and deviation and especially the opportunity for important action, which is the point on which the classicist puts prime emphasis, are normally though not invariably associated with a high rather than with a mean social estate. In general one should insist that the decorum worked out under French auspices was far from being merely artificial. The French gentleman (honnête homme) of the seventeenth century often showed a moderation and freedom from over-emphasis, an exquisite tact and urbanity that did not fall too far short of his immediate model, Horace, and related him to the all-round man of the Greeks (𝜅𝛼𝜆𝜊𝜍 𝜅𝛼𝛾𝛼𝜃𝜊𝜍). To be sure an ascetic Christian like Pascal sees in decorum a disguise of one’s ordinary self rather than a real curb upon it, and feels that the gap is not sufficiently wide between even the best type of the man of the world and the mere worldling. One needs, however, to be very austere to disdain the art of living that has been fostered by decorum from the Greeks down. Something of this art of living survives even in a Chesterfield, who falls far short of the best type of French gentlemen and reminds one very remotely indeed of a Pericles. Chesterfield’s half-jesting definition of decorum as the art of combining the useful appearances of virtue with the solid satisfactions of vice points the way to its ultimate corruption. Talleyrand, who, marks perhaps this last stage, was defined by Napoleon as ‘’a silk stocking filled with mud.” In some of its late exemplars decorum had actually become, as Rousseau complains, the “mask of hypocrisy” and the “varnish of vice.”

One should not however, like Rousseau and the romanticists, judge of decorum by what it degenerated into. Every doctrine of genuine worth is disciplinary and men in the mass do not desire discipline. “Most men,” says Aristotle, “would rather live in a disorderly than in a sober manner.” But most men do not admit any such preference—that would be crude and inartistic. They incline rather to substitute for the reality of discipline some art of going through the motions. Every great doctrine is thus in constant peril of passing over into some hollow semblance or even, it may be, into some mere caricature of itself. When one wishes therefore to determine the nature of decorum one should think of a Milton, let us say, and not of a Talleyrand or even of a Chesterfield.

Milton imitated the models, like any other neo-classicist, but his imitation was not, in Joubert’s phrase, that of one book by another book, but of one soul by another soul. His decorum is therefore imaginative; and it is the privilege of the imagination to give the sense of spaciousness and infinitude. On the other hand, the unimaginative way in which many of the neo-classicists held their main tenets—nature, imitation, probability, decorum—narrowed unduly the scope of the human spirit and appeared to close the gates of the future. “Art and diligence have now done their best,” says Dr. Johnson of the versification of Pope, “and what shall be added will be the effort of tedious toil and needless curiosity.” Nothing is more perilous than thus to seem to confine man in some pinfold; there is something in him that refuses to acquiesce in any position as final; he is in Nietzsche’s phrase the being who must always surpass himself. The attempt to oppose external and mechanical barriers to the freedom of the spirit will create in the long run an atmosphere of stuffiness and smugness, and nothing is more intolerable than smugness. Men were guillotined in the French Revolution, as Bagehot suggests, simply because either they or their ancestors had been smug. Inert acceptance of tradition and routine will be met sooner or later by the cry of Faust: Hinaus ins Freie!

]]>https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/10/03/rousseau-romanticism-chapter-part-4/feed/0364Rousseau and Romanticism, Chapter I (Part 3)https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/09/15/rousseau-and-romanticism-chapter-i-part-3/
https://www.traditionrestored.com/2017/09/15/rousseau-and-romanticism-chapter-i-part-3/#respondFri, 15 Sep 2017 16:43:23 +0000https://www.traditionrestored.com/?p=356I am happy to present the third post of Chapter I of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing...

]]>I am happy to present the third post of Chapter I of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing critique of romanticism as a literary school ever penned. Babbitt (1865-1933) was a cultural and literary critic, serving as Professor of French Literature at Harvard. He and his friend Paul Elmer More (of Princeton) became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism. Babbitt was a pioneer in the study of comparative literature; his writing, as you will see, is notable for its clarity and perspicacity.

CHAPTER I

THE TERMS CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC (PART 3)III

Because the classicism against which romanticism rebelled was inadequate it does not follow that every type of classicism suffers from a similar inadequacy.The great movement away from imaginative unrestraint towards regularity and good sense took place in the main under French auspices. In general the French have been the chief exponents of the classic spirit in modern times. They themselves feel this so strongly that a certain group in France has of late years inclined to use interchangeably the words classicist and nationalist. But this is a grave confusion, for if the classic spirit is anything at all it is in its essence not local and national, but universal and human. To be sure, any particular manifestation of classicism will of necessity contain elements that are less universal, elements that reflect merely a certain person or persons, or a certain age and country. This is a truth that we scarcely need to have preached to us; for with the growth of the historical method we have come to fix our attention almost exclusively on these local and relative elements. The complete critic will accept the historical method but be on his guard against its excess. He will see an element in man that is set above the local and the relative; he will learn to detect this abiding element through all the flux of circumstance; in Platonic language, he will perceive the One in the Many.

Formerly, it must be admitted, critics were not historical enough. They took to be of the essence of classicism what was merely its local coloring, especially the coloring it received from the French of the seventeenth century. If we wish to distinguish between essence and accident in the classic spirit we must get behind the French of the seventeenth century, behind the Italians of the sixteenth century who laid the foundations of neo-classical theory, behind the Romans who were the immediate models of most neo-classicists, to the source of classicism in Greece. Even in Greece the classic spirit is very much implicated in the local and the relative, yet in the life of no other people perhaps does what is universal in man shine forth more clearly from what is only local and relative. We still need, therefore, to return to Greece, not merely for the best practice, but for the best theory of classicism; for this is still found in spite of all its obscurities and incompleteness in the Poetics of Aristotle. If we have recourse to this treatise, however, it must be on condition that we do not, like the critics of the Renaissance, deal with it in an abstract and dogmatic way (the form of the treatise it must be confessed gave them no slight encouragement), but in a spirit akin to Aristotle’s own as revealed in the total body of his writings—a spirit that is at its best positive and experimental.

Aristotle not only deals positively and experimentally with the natural order and with man so far as he is a part of this order, but he deals in a similar fashion with a side of man that the modern positivist often overlooks. Like all the great Greeks Aristotle recognizes that man is the creature of two laws: he has an ordinary or natural self of impulse and desire and a human self that is known practically as a power of control over impulse and desire. If man is to become human he must not let impulse and desire run wild, but must oppose to everything excessive in his ordinary self, whether in thought or deed or emotion, the law of measure. This insistence on restraint and proportion is rightly taken to be of the essence not merely of the Greek spirit but of the classical spirit in general. The norm or standard that is to set bounds to the ordinary self is got at by different types of classicists in different ways and described variously: for example, as the human law or the better self, or reason (a word to be discussed more fully later), or nature. Thus when Boileau says, “Let nature be your only study,” he does not mean outer nature, nor again the nature of this or that individual, but representative human nature. Having decided what is normal either for man or some particular class of men the classicist takes this normal “nature’’ for his model and proceeds to imitate it. Whatever accords with the model he has thus set up he pronounces natural or probable, whatever on the other hand departs too far from what he concludes to be the normal type or the normal sequence of cause and effect he holds to be “improbable” and unnatural or even, if it attains an extreme of abnormality, “monstrous.” Whatever in conduct or character is duly restrained and proportionate with reference to the model is said to observe decorum. Probability and decorum are identical in some of their aspects and closely related in all. (1) To recapitulate, a general nature, a core of normal experience, is affirmed by all classicists. From this central affirmation derives the doctrine of imitation, and from imitation in turn the doctrines of probability and decorum.

But though all classicists are alike in insisting on nature, imitation, probability and decorum, they differ widely, as I have already intimated, in what they understand by these terms. Let us consider first understand what Aristotle and the Greeks understand by them. The first point to observe is that according to Aristotle one is to get his general nature not on authority or second hand, but is to disengage it directly for himself from the jumble of particulars that he has before his eyes. He is not, says Aristotle, to imitate things as they are, but as they ought to be. Thus conceived imitation is a creative act. Through all the welter of the actual one penetrates to the real and so succeeds without ceasing to be individual in suggesting the universal. Poetry that is imitative in this sense is, according to Aristotle, more “serious” and “philosophical” than history. History deals merely with what has happened, whereas poetry deals with what may happen according to probability or necessity. Poetry, that is, does not portray life literally but extricates the deeper or ideal truth from the flux of circumstance. One may add with Sydney that if poetry is thus superior to history in being more serious and philosophical it resembles history and is superior to philosophy in being concrete.

The One that the great poet or artist perceives in the Many and that gives to his work its high seriousness is not a fixed absolute. In general the model that the highly serious man (𝜊 𝜎𝜋𝜊𝜐𝛿𝛼𝜄𝜊𝜍) imitates and that keeps his ordinary self within the bounds of decorum is not to be taken as anything finite, as anything that can be formulated once for all. This point is important for on it hinges every right distinction not merely between the classic and the romantic, but between the classic and the pseudo-classic. Romanticism has claimed for itself a monopoly of imagination and infinitude, but on closer examination, as I hope to show later, this claim, at least so far as genuine classicism is concerned, will be found to be quite unjustified. For the present it is enough to say that true classicism does not rest on the observance of rules or the imitation of models but on an immediate insight into the universal. Aristotle is especially admirable in the account he gives of this insight and of the way it may manifest itself in art and literature. One may be rightly imitative, he says, and so have access to a superior truth and give others access to it only by being a master of illusion. Though the great poet “breathes immortal air,” though he sees behind the shows of sense a world of more abiding relationships, he can convey his vision not directly but only imaginatively. Aristotle, one should observe, does not establish any hard and fast opposition between judgment and imagination, an opposition that pervades not only the neo-classical movement but also the romantic revolt from it. He simply affirms a supersensuous order which one can perceive only with the help of fiction The best art, says Goethe in the true spirit of Aristotle, gives us the ‘‘illusion of a higher reality.’’ This has the advantage of being experimental. It is merely a statement of what one feels in the presence of a great painting, let us say, or in reading a great poem.

(1) The French Academy discriminates in its Sentiments sur le Cid between two types of probability, “ordinary” and “extraordinary.” Probability in general is more especially reserved for action. In the domain of action “ordinary” probability and decorum run very close together. It is, for example, both indecorous and improbable that Chimène in the Cid should marry her father’s murderer.